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For the third straight year, the Broad Institute has been selected by the Boston Globe as one of the “Top Places to Work” in Massachusetts. This honor is an amazing tribute to the entire Broad community and its collaborative spirit.

Last week on the Broad website, we featured recent work by Broad researchers that can shed new light on the massive genomic changes taking place in cancer cells. The genomes in tumors are often drastically disorganized, with large chunks of missing or extra DNA — even whole chromosomes — in addition to smaller, single-letter mutations. These alterations can complicate the search for genetic changes underlying cancer.

This past October, we announced that Paul Blainey, an expert in single-molecule and single-cell approaches, would be joining the Broad as a core faculty member in early 2012. He will join us after completing postdoctoral research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Stephen Quake, where he has pioneered novel methods to perform single-cell microbial sequencing. As part of this work, he designed a 3.5-cm microfluidic chip that sorts single cells and amplifies their genomes to prepare for sequencing.

Last year during the holiday season, we invited Broad researchers to submit scientific images with a seasonal flair. We thought it would be fun to revisit those images, resembling holiday lights, cracked ice, and tinsel. Enjoy this slideshow of festive imagery from the world of science as we count down to the new year!

Broadies are pros at sharing. They share ideas, data, equipment, and even bikes. So it may be no surprise to learn that behind the scenes of the Broad’s fast-paced research computing network for data collection and analysis, servers have been quietly getting in the sharing game, too, going “virtual” to save the Broad money, energy, and space and to keep pace with the growing demand for efficient computing by large and diverse research projects throughout the institute.

After completing graduate school, computational scientist Miriah Meyer noticed a disappointing trend in data visualization. “Our field is usually about generalities,” she says. “We create algorithms or systems that are very general for some broad class of problems or types of data.” But Miriah saw that these solutions, especially those for the analysis of biological data, often didn’t help answer the specific questions of scientists using them.

Yesterday on the blog, we introduced you to some of the Broad researchers who built tools, teams, and resources to generate and analyze a massive flood of data and analytical code for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Today we give you a look at the system they built to manage data analysis for the project: Firehose.

In this two-part series, we’ll give you a look at some of the tools, teams, and resources built by Broad Institute scientists to support the large-scale cancer sequencing project known as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).